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Today the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion in Quon v. Arch Wireless, holding that "users of text messaging services such as those provided by Arch Wireless have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their text messages." The Court concluded:

The search of Appellants’ text messages violated their Fourth Amendment and California constitutional privacy rights because they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of the text messages, and the search was unreasonable in scope.

In a landmark ruling last year, the Sixth Circuit held that the Fourth Amendment protects email stored with a third party. Today's ruling applies the Fourth Amendment to text messaging.

Counter Spy Act -- Pro-Privacy or Anti-Piracy?
A new bill in the Senate is designed to fight spyware -- but Ed Foster says it provides a loophole for software makers who would like the ability to remotely disable software that is suspected of being pirated.

Last week, the Associated Press sent the Drudge Retort seven DMCA takedown notices, demanding that the site remove excerpts of AP articles ranging from 33 to 79 words that were linked through to authorized copies of the AP stories.

As as business matter, the AP's approach is curious. The AP makes money by licensing its stories to its members. Its members make money by getting people to read their stories. Links that send traffic to AP member sites are a good thing for the AP and its membership.

Members of Congress are currently negotiating language for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) legislation, with reports saying that a deal is imminent. As early as this week, Congress may be voting on this legislation, which will determine whether or not telecommunications companies will be given immunity against lawsuits for their illegal participation in the President's warrantless surveillance program. While it's certain that the legislation will be touted as a compromise by its supporters, all reports indicate that the legislation's aim will be to provide blanket immunity for lawbreaking phone companies.

A broad group of civil society organizations have put together a declaration to the OECD ministers with our recommendations, to ensure that our views get heard alongside those of the many business and government interests represented here.

A proposed new law in Sweden (voted on this week, after much delay) will, if passed, allow a secretive government agency ostensibly concerned with signals intelligence to install technology in twenty public hubs across the country. There it will be permitted to conduct a huge mass data-mining project, processing and analysing the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals. Allegedly these monitoring stations will be restricted to data passing across Sweden's borders with other countries for the purposes of monitoring terrorist activity: but there seems few judicial or technical safeguards to prevent domestic communications from being swept up in the dragnet. Sound familiar?

Today The Hill and Congressional Quarterly are reporting that a deal has been reached on legislation to amend FISA, which will include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. Under the guise of a compromise, the legislation is designed to ensure that the only issue the courts will review is whether or not the President told the telecoms that their conduct was legal, but not whether the conduct actually was legal.